Crianças e jovens e a preparação do “craque”

Abstract

The managers of Brazilian football have never bothered to train coaches for the grassroots leagues. To train children and teenagers, they have preferred to use former players needing to keep working to survive. However, possessing a vast experience as a professional football player has never been enough for one to understand the process of growth and development at this stage of life. The fragile architecture that supports ambitious agents, non-professional and underpaidstaff and dreaming boys, and which has no physical, technical or emotional support, is born doomed to failure. We are twenty years behind the European model, in which the specialized training of coaches capable of identifying and training new talents is a permanent concern of football federations.